Thursday, November 21, 2013

MORE MINERAL SPRING WATER DYEING

A few posts ago I wrote about my experiments with red onion skins and the different mineral spring waters in my town. The photo below shows the red onion skin results on the right. Big change in color except for one of the springs. The top two swatches are rain water and tap water (left to right). Only one spring kept the mauve color. All others saddened the color. The left side shows results from my recent experiment with yellow onion skins.
 I expected the same results--all of the waters saddening the color from the skins. But much to my surprise I got some awesome color range. I used silk fabric just as I did with the red skins. Tap water resulted in a medium apricot color (top left swatch). Other springs gave a range from pale gold to variations of what I am going to  call a squash color. The one spring that has a significant amount of iron in it shifted the color to the golden khaki (second swatch on the right).
So it seems the pigments in the red onion skins reacted more to the minerals in the water than the pigments in the yellow skins. Interesting. I wish I understood more about what is happening. More research needed.

A big thank you to India Flint www.indiaflint.com  for starting me off on this journey.